world, and then the novel faded from view. Might it be that All Else is Folly fell victim to the more dominant narrative of the war, written by the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, and perpetuated by literary critics like Paul Fussell, where the more desolate, the more grim, the better, at least in literary circles? Or is the cause of neglect found in our very own soil? More than any other in Canada’s history, the First World War is held aloft as the event in which nationhood began to take root. How then is it that all novels written by Canadian veterans of the conflict quickly fell out of print? How is it that only one, Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed, returned and remained consistently in print? How is it that Canadian students read All Quiet on the Western Front while the Great War novels of veterans Peregrine Acland, Philip Child, W. Redvers Dent, and Will Bird are unrecognized?
A scandal, indeed. It is hoped that this edition, the first in more than eight decades, will at long last bring this most central of Canada’s war novels back to prominence.
Notes
1 William Arthur Deacon, “W.A.D. Says Acland Novel One of the Best in Europe or America,” The Ottawa Citizen, October 5, 1929: 13
2 Roger Irwin, “Fiction Holds Own Against Encroaching Books of Fact,” The Globe, December 17,1929: 19.
3 Peregrine Acland,“My Life, War Adventures and Poems,” Pearson’s Magazine, October 1918: 326.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Peregrine Acland, “Spring in the Foothills,” The Canadian Magazine, April 1913: 546.
7 John Masefield, letter to PA, February 4, 1915, Peregrine Acland fonds, LAC.
8 lfred Noyes (1880–1958), English poet and short story writer. Though a pacifist, he enlisted, believing that war was justified against an aggressive enemy.
9 William Douw Lighthall (1857–1954), lawyer, novelist, and poet, remembered for Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), considered a groundbreaking anthology of Canadian verse.
10 W.D. Lighthall. “Canadian Poets of the Great War,” in From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada – Third Series, Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1918, Appendix A: LI.
11 Pearson’s Magazine: 327.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Projecting into enemy territory, the Ypres salient was the site of numerous battles, the most famous being the Second Battle of Ypres (April 21–May 25, 1915), which saw the destruction of much of Ypres and Germany’s first mass use of poison gas on the Western Front.
16 Ibid, 328.
17 Ibid.
18 At the time of the first deployment, the Battle of the Somme had been raging for more than a month. The largest engagement of the war, it ended on November 18, 1916, having claimed over one million casualties.
19 Pearson’s Magazine: 328.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, May 2, 1924, Groton School Archives.
23 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, December 20, 1925, Groton School Archives.
24 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, March 16, 1921, Groton School Archives. Ian Hay is the pseudonym of John Hay Beith, author of The First Hundred Thousand (1916). A lighthearted account of his wartime experiences serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, it proved to be one of the most popular books published during the conflict.
a note on the text
This new edition of All Else is Folly uses the text from the final 1929 McClelland & Stewart edition. Inconsistencies in the spelling of specific words have been edited to favour the Canadian. Two versions of the poem “The Reveille of Romance” have been added to this edition.
ALL ELSE IS FOLLY
To M.L.A.
Even if there were not a thousand other reasons for doing so, I would dedicate this book to you because your criticisms have been my chief help in writing it.
P.A.
“It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy.”
— Havelock Ellis
“You I advise not to work but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory. Let your work be a fight. Let your peace be a victory.…
“Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.”
— Friederich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra
I do hope that, quite apart from the esthetico-literary considerations that are my usual tic and that as a rule prevent the British reader from paying any attention to books that I urge on his attention so that I practically never, whatever may be the case with the United States, write any prefaces for the English editions of books.… I do hope then that a very large public may be found for Major Acland’s book on both sides of the Atlantic.
For it is the convincing, mournful and unrelieved account of a simple soul’s sufferings in the late war.
And I believe that those sufferings have never been sufficiently brought home to the public as a whole and that is why the late war has not aroused half the horror of war as a whole that it should have aroused.… For the defect of all novel-writing is that, as a rule, the novelist — heaven help him! — must needs select unusual, hypersensitized souls to endure any vicissitudes that he is pleased to make them endure and that makes him lose half the game with the normal reader. I remember very well — for I am not pleading not guilty! — thinking to myself when about half-way through a novel about the late war: “Well, my central character is altogether such a queer, unusual fellow that I do not see how anyone is going much to sympathize with him in his misfortunes.…” Thoughts to that effect…. And pretty nearly as much can be said of the books of most of my Anglo-Saxon or Latin colleagues, whilst, on the whole, writers from the Central or Slavic Empires emphasize the note by dwelling on the sufferings of mournful but unusual peasants. The result is that the normal man says: “These are not normal people!” and continues to comfort himself either by imagining that the late struggle was for those engaged in it a perpetual picnic varied with sexual jamborees or by ignoring the matter altogether.
That is a misfortune. But it is a misfortune that Major Acland’s book may do a great deal to mitigate. For his central character is about as normal in temperament and circumstances as it is possible to be. He is neither high nor low in station; neither hypersensitized nor callous; neither Adonis nor Caliban; neither illiterate nor of the intelligentsia; neither a brute nor a poet, though like so many of us he writes an occasional very mediocre sonnet which fails to cause the lady of his devotion to fall for him. And he is no coward and no hero — though he endures without much squealing sufferings out of which he, like the rest of us, would very gladly have got — wangled, used to be the technical word!… “If one could only,” one used to say innumerable times, “wrangle a staff job.”
